Bayou Fairy Tale (7 page)

She narrowed her eyes and gave a tight-lipped frown. She was unflappable, not a single indication Taylor was getting under her skin.

“No.” Even with such a simple phrase, Aliss commanded Taylor’s attention. As much as he tried to brush her off, he couldn’t help being sucked into her presence. “I expect you to make the sacrifice of true love. That is….” She gave him a knowing smile. “If he is your true love.”

Taylor snorted as he picked up on the jab. “Get a grip. I get enough dirty looks from a fucking kindergarten teacher already.”

“They did say you had a temper,” Aliss said as she stepped toward him. “Brash, abrasive, wild, problems with authority.”

Taylor stepped back, only to trip over the bucket of cleaning supplies. He crashed to his rear and yelped in embarrassment. No one in the activity area gave him a second glance as Devon led the children through a round of Head, Shoulders, Knees, and Toes.

Aliss loomed over him. Her smirk vanished, replaced with a royal sternness. “If you want to free the huntsman of his curse, you need to listen. In exchange for your full cooperation with the Library, the huntsman will no longer suffer his memory loss. He will remember you.” She smiled, for the first time in kindness. “He will remember you every day. And what you meant to each other.”

Taylor didn’t understand. He slowly stood. “Remember everything?” The idea made his stomach clench with confusion, yet temptation. “No more journals? No more starting over every seven days?” He failed to keep the hopeful tone out of his voice.

“We are in agreement?” Aliss asked. “You’ll cooperate?”

“If I can save Corentin and Atticus, I’m in.” Taylor gave a confident nod.

She held out her palm to the knife. The blade burst into motes of red light and reappeared in her hand. Taylor squinted at the wide, curving blade, a red pulsing glow dancing down the knife in a network of thin veins. He swallowed. The blade pulsed with each beat of his heart. Taylor glanced from Aliss to the blade and back. He pressed his lips together, keeping silent.

“With this blade,” Aliss said, and the knife lifted from her fingers, hovering and twirling over her palm. “The huntsman must use it to capture his most elusive trophy. He will bring it to me, where the trophy will be destroyed. And he will be truly the huntsman he has forgotten.”

Taylor nodded slowly. Her voice was different, softer, deep inside his head. Her words pulsed like the blood in his ears. She could have been speaking, and they could have been in the library, but Taylor wasn’t sure. He was elsewhere, the beating light of the blade calling to him like a distant whisper. Words he couldn’t quite hear. A language he didn’t understand.

“What is the trophy?” he whispered to the blade.

Your heart.
The words roared in his mind like the scream of a hurricane.

Taylor jerked back, backpedaling to find his footing and barely missing the bucket of cleaning supplies. “What the fuck,” he gasped. “What the hell are you talking about?” He coughed and then glared at Aliss. “I thought you wanted my skillset to help with Atticus?”

Aliss blinked and confusion crossed her features. “Did I say you? I said we wanted the huntsman. We need you to help us secure him.”

“By cutting out my heart?” Taylor snapped. There was always a catch to Enchant bullshit. “What kind of sick fuck are you?”

Aliss narrowed her eyes, and her irritated frown reappeared. “I am the Queen of Hearts, after all. And either you’ll cooperate, or you’ll become another situation the Library has to clean up.”

“How about you try cleaning piss off an antique wood floor?” Taylor growled and flipped her off. “If you think for one second you’re going after Atticus, you’ll have to go through me.”

“Who are you talking to, Mr. Taylor?” a little girl asked behind him.

Taylor startled and spun on his heel. Rachel, Miss Miriam’s perkiest student, smiled up at him, her blue eyes bright and almost too big for her face.

“H-Hey Rachel,” Taylor said as the nerves crept into his voice. “I was just talking to my fri—” He turned back to Aliss, only to see the nothingness of the empty aisle. He knew it was useless to think she was elsewhere in the library. When magic was afoot, anything was possible. He shivered as he slowly digested everything Aliss had said. Free Corentin? By sacrificing himself? It had to be bullshit. There had to be another way. If princes and princesses could get their curses broken by making out, breaking the curse of a Cronespawn must be something just as stupidly simple.

“Do you like my drawing?” Rachel asked, holding up her paper.

Taylor slowly turned to her with a scripted smile on his face. The smile fell at the sight of Rachel’s medium: the Andersen Institute letter.

A sinister stick figure drawn in red crayon grinned wickedly at him from the letter. In one of his appendages, he held a crooked club. Maybe a bat? Taylor ventured a guess. “Is he a baseball player?” he asked as he crouched to her level. “Your dad likes the Red Sox, doesn’t he?”

Rachel laughed. “You’re silly, Mr. Taylor.” She pointed to the drawing scrawled over the paragraph discussing the specifics of Atticus’s current state of recovery. Taylor winced at the ruined letter. “He’s the Axeman.”

Taylor froze.

“The… Axeman?” he asked quietly, forcing himself to smile.

Rachel nodded quickly. The poor thing was all too proud of herself. “He lives in my backyard.”

“
Okay
!” Taylor yelped as he shot to his feet. The hairs on the back of his neck stood, and he rubbed his hands together. He forced a chuckle and then clapped twice. “Hey, sweetie, can I have your drawing? I think my best friend would really like it.” He faked excitement as he folded his hands together in begging. He needed to get the letter. He prayed Devon hadn’t seen it. He had taken care not to mention Atticus to her. “Please? Please? Please, can I have it? My best friend would really love it.
Really
.”

“Mr. Ten?” Rachel asked and bounced on her toes. Her sneakers squeaked and lit up with their pressure-sensitive lights. She giggled and spun in a cheerful circle.

Taylor arched a brow and cracked a slow smile. He didn’t know what it was about Corentin, but he even had five-year-old screaming fans. Did he have all of Hancock County under some spell? Or his rakish charm? Maybe he poisoned the well water.

Rachel started to hand over the letter but stopped in her tracks. “Oh! I should put my name on it!”

As she scuttled back to the activity area, Taylor followed close behind. He noted where Miss Miriam and Devon were amid all the other children. Devon smiled at Taylor as she prepared the snack trays. Miss Miriam was instructing Bennett to use his right hand instead of his left.

Rachel yanked out a black crayon and scribbled on the paper. “Tooo…. Misssteeeer…. Teeeeen…,” she said as she wrote. “Looooove…. Raaachel.” She handed Taylor the page in a flourish, as if she were a newspaper reporter flinging notes. Taylor took the letter and made sure he could still read the pertinent information under the markings.

Devon plucked a cookie off the tray, handed it to Rachel, and winked at Taylor. “Rachel has a present for Corentin, huh?”

Taylor pressed the letter close to his chest, trying to hide the paper. “Mmmhmm. Very special.”

Rachel overdramatically swooned in her seat. “When I’m old enough, I’m gunna marry Mr. Ten!”

Taylor slapped his hand over his mouth and glanced at Devon. Her cheeks puffed as she held in a laugh.
Don’t
, he tried to tell her.

Devon grinned instead and gave Rachel an extra cookie. “And you’ll be his princess?”

Rachel bounced in her seat. “Like Sleeping Beauty!”

“
Okay
!” Taylor squeaked, and all eyes turned to him. He coughed and swallowed as the embarrassment stung every pore. “I’m”—he pointed toward the break room—“going to get some more glitter.”

He tacked on a smile and hurried to the librarian lounge. Once he crossed the threshold, he made sure to lock the door behind him, then collapsed onto the nearby couch. The letter slipped to the floor.

Ringo fluttered down from the bookcase and settled on the floor. He paced around the letter and rubbed his chin. “I’m no art critic, but that is a creepy-assed drawing.”

Taylor folded his arms behind his head and sighed. “Tell me about the Library.”

Ringo blinked. “We’re in one?”

Taylor narrowed his eyes. “The Queen of Hearts wants to recruit us.” It wasn’t lying, not really. He pulled his right arm from behind his head, held up his palm, and flexed his fingers, imagining a knife there.

“Oh,” Ringo said. “
That
Library. The Big
L
.”

“Yeah. Big
L
.” Taylor snorted.

Ringo wrung his hands. “It’s kind of a long story.”

“Well, skip the ‘Once Upon A Time’ part and get to the point.” Taylor stared at the ceiling. Was this what it was like for Corentin when he had a bad day? Everything going topsy-turvy? Too much to digest all at once? Too many things that were pure coincidence, but had to be fate?

But the questions remained. Did Corentin really have to kill Taylor to break his curse? And the only part he needed for the spell to work was to make true love’s sacrifice? Taylor knew he had been a selfish person before, but now he had things in order. He’d changed. The truth prickled like the hair on the back of his neck. The selfishness had never left him. He would stay alive if it meant he could be happy with Corentin forever.

None of it made sense. His eye twitched like someone had taken an icepick to the bridge of his nose. He needed sleep. Who knows how much of the day so far was all in his head. Did he even go to bed last night? Was he dreaming? He snorted in derision. Taylor was Sleeping Beauty after all, the technical expert on dreaming.

He waited for Ringo to explain it all away so everything would fall into place.

“They don’t exist.”

Instead, Ringo’s words ruined everything.

Taylor fixed him with a dour look. “You’re kidding.”

Wringing his hands, Ringo hung his head. “They’re kind of an urban legend.”

“Hello, we come from a race of fairy tales and urban legends.”

Ringo nodded. “Well. Yeah. You see, the Library is one of those things you’re better off pretending isn’t real.”

Taylor perked. “Are they spooky or something? C’mon. Give me something.”

Ringo huffed and tossed up his hands. “Look. I don’t really know the particulars, okay? It’s not like I met anyone from the Library. I just heard rumors about it, is all.”

Sitting up, Taylor blinked away the dizziness from the lack of sleep. “But I met the Queen of Hearts. She was just here.”

“So you did.” Ringo paused for far too long and thumbed his chin.

“Yeah, I di—”

“Let’s just ignore you did.”

“What?” Taylor gaped at him.

Ringo crossed his arms. “We need time to figure this out, okay? No one’s seen the Queen of Hearts for years. Last I heard, they did the whole ‘off with her head’ and everything.”

Taylor slowly pieced it together. “She’s a wicked queen, then?”

Ringo shrugged. “Well. She
is
the Queen of Hearts. She’s not known for being lovey-dovey. Some say she’s totally all Lady Báthory kind of deal.”

Taylor went silent and propped his chin in his palm. That explained why she wanted Corentin and not him. He was essentially the “sweet young maiden” for sacrifice. But it contradicted the Enchant legends—the princesses led the charge while the princes threw themselves on swords to protect their true loves.

Perhaps it was Taylor’s turn to do something good for Corentin in return.

But why did it feel so wrong? Taylor shook his head. His own selfishness was getting the best of him. He was so desperate to maintain his happy life with Corentin, he’d do anything to keep it.

Even lie.

“You’re right,” Taylor said.

“Right? About what?” Ringo blinked his disproportionately huge eyes.

Taylor forced a smile. “I probably made it up. You know. Sleep-deprived and all.”

Ringo nodded once. “If you say so.”

Pushing from the couch, Taylor watched Ringo. Would he lie with him? Or would he broadcast it everywhere? He held up his pinky. “Pinky promise?”

Ringo seemed to catch the gist and took flight to Taylor’s level. He tapped his tiny pinky to the offered digit. “Pinky promise.”

May 3

Ellsworth, Maine

“THERE,” CORENTIN
said as he plucked the hapless Barbie doll from the sewage pipe. The poor damsel definitely needed more than true love’s kiss to revive her, with her shit-slicked hair and toilet-papered dress.

He turned her over in his grasp and hummed. “She’s last year’s holiday edition.” It had only occurred to him from his journal and the photographs of him and Taylor visiting the Barbie Dreamhouse Experience in Minneapolis. He shook his head with a grin.

Corentin had kept his trap shut about the overload of pink and purple impugning on his manhood. He had mustered a charming smile for the little girls when Taylor and he had been assigned to a tea party table. A once-in-a-lifetime experience, Taylor had said. Corentin had promptly sought a palate cleanser of a Seahawks and 49ers game. He didn’t even like the Seahawks or the 49ers. But the battle of the gridiron was enough to recharge his depleted testosterone.

As he considered the doll, he smiled at her mangled face. “Girl, put on some lipstick, have a drink, and pull yourself together.” He pulled a trash bag from his bucket and shoved the doll in like nothing more than a corpse into a body bag.

“Got it,” he called up to the open living room window.

He caught sight of Ramona’s wavy blonde hair. Naturally she had the time to style it before he had shown up. She perked up from her magazine and then turned to the window. “My hero!” she squealed.

Corentin coughed into his elbow. “Got a place I can wash up?” He coughed again. Honeysuckle would turn him into a toadstool if he dared dump his soiled clothes in the laundry.

“You can use the shower.” Ramona pointed over her shoulder, indicating the bathroom somewhere in the house. She seemed eager, and her smile set Corentin’s teeth on edge. He was sure she was just being nice, but Taylor’s playful ribbing stuck out in his mind.